Child Poverty Bill

It may be premature to ask, but does the Minister have any sense of what the commission’s overall budget for research might be? What could be done will depend on that. She rightly said that the DWP commissions and produces much admirable research. It is well publicised and I think that we are grateful for it. However, the two areas of research which the department finds harder to access and which we could perhaps steer the commission toward considering are, first, the work undertaken through seminars and journals. It is not DWP research and has not yet been fully and officially published. It is the sort of thing that goes into abstracts of journals. I know that a lot of such semi-subterranean work is being done by social policy and social work departments which never quite hits the light of day but can be important in some of the areas that we are considering; for example, fostering of children. Secondly, the research that the DWP has done—for example, longitudinal research on lone-parent behaviour commissioned from the Policy Studies Institute, of which I was a trustee—is long-time. When the commission, the government or civil servants seek an answer to a question, and if one is doing anything other than a 20 or 40 person-focused qualitative interview, it normally takes about 18 months to two years before one can get it. By the time one has found the contractors, negotiated the contract, done the pilot work and evaluation and reported back, the questions have changed. One of the real problems in high-quality research is the picking-up-the-petticoats attitude to quick-and-dirty research which may steer you in the right direction in the interim. Quite often, you want quick answers to show that something is probably going in the right direction, but you will confirm it when the full research has been done. Will my noble friend consider whether the commission could go into those two areas which the DWP finds hardest to deal with: first, subterranean research and, secondly, quick-and-dirty research, to see whether a policy is steering in the right direction, thereby feeding back into policy development and pilots much more quickly?